


Six Wishes

by lotherington



Series: The Detective [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-28
Updated: 2011-11-28
Packaged: 2017-10-26 15:58:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotherington/pseuds/lotherington
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six times that John Watson wished The Detective would come back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Six Wishes

_Seven years and nine months_

 _‘Come along, John,’ The Detective said, holding out his large, gloved hand for John to take. Eyes wide, John grasped The Detective’s hand tightly and grinned up at the tall man, who smiled back down at him. ‘Where would you like to go today?’ he asked, pushing off the gates of the school that he had been leaning on._

 _‘The moon,’ John replied, adding a spring to his step that was half a jump and half a skip as he and The Detective walked to the TARDIS, which was parked on the pavement opposite John’s school. Oh, everyone would be so jealous of him. No-one else got to go time-and-space travelling after school, they only got to go to ballet or football or gymnastics or swimming._

 _‘The moon?’ The Detective said, raising one of his eyebrows like he always did when John said something a bit boring._

 _‘No, not the moon,’ John said hurriedly. ‘Not the moon, we’ll go to... we’ll go to the War. Can we go and see the War?’_

 _‘By _the_ War, I’m assuming you mean the Second World War?’ The Detective asked, and John nodded. _

‘Yep, that’s the one,’ he said. ‘We learnt about it in school today. I think I’d make a good soldier.’

‘You’d make a very fine soldier indeed,’ The Detective said, letting go of John’s hand and pulling the door to the TARDIS open, taking John’s schoolbag from him. ‘1943 it is, then. Hop aboard, Private Watson.’

The sound of glass smashing downstairs woke John up as soon as he was about to step inside the TARDIS. Half startled by the noise, and half upset that he’d been dreaming after all, John burst into tears, fingers clutching at his duvet as the grey light of the morning stole across his bedroom.

***

 _Seven years and eleven months_

Of course, seeing as John had never actually been inside the TARDIS - that _was_ what The Detective had said, wasn’t it? - he didn’t really know how to carry on that bit of the story. He usually jumped into the nearest available cardboard box or plastic washing basket or wheelbarrow and closed his eyes as tightly as he possibly could while he waited for the journey to the moon or another galaxy or a hundred years ago to be over, but the part where he had to actually get inside the magic box always threw him out of his imagination a little bit.

This time, he’d dragged a big cardboard box into the garden and had climbed inside and curled up in the bottom, his eyes closed as he tried to picture The Detective. He was probably just having trouble getting his magic box fixed, maybe the engineers for it were on a planet really, _really_ far away. John didn’t want to forget what The Detective looked like. He never, ever wanted to forget.

Granny Watson had knitted him a doll of The Detective according to John’s extensive descriptions and his drawings. It wasn’t _perfect_ , The Detective was a bit too funny-looking to get _exactly_ right, especially not with _wool_ , but Granny Watson had done a pretty good job, really, and the doll had become his constant companion.

‘Detective,’ he whispered, his left hand wrapped tightly around the doll’s middle, his fingers gripping tighter at the sound of his dad shouting at Harry inside the house. ‘I wish you’d come back soon.’

***

 _Eight years_

‘Blow your candles out, then, Johnny!’ Granny Watson said, grinning at him from the other side of the table. ‘Don’t forget to make a wish!’

John smiled slightly and leant forward, scrunching his face up so much it _hurt_. He wished harder than he’d ever wished for anything as he took a deep breath and made sure to get all of his candles in one go as he blew them out.

 _I wish The Detective would come back_ , he thought, still frowning, his eyes shut tight as Granny Watson and Harry and even Dad and a couple of other family members cheered and clapped. _I wish The Detective would come back and take me to see all of time and space. I wish that he’d come back._

***

 _Eight years and six months_

‘Where to, today, John Watson?’ John said in a booming voice with a very proper accent as he strode around his bedroom in a ridiculously over-sized shirt that his dad had been about to throw away because of the red wine stain down the front of it. John had stopped him, because for one, it was almost the same shade of blue The Detective’s shirt had been, and also because the red wine stain could be anything from blood to organic matter from another universe to berry juice from the Garden of Eden. He was wearing an old pair of trousers of his own as well, and he’d put rips in the knee so he had an almost exact copy of The Detective’s outfit. ‘Paris? Neptune? The dinosaur times?’ he asked the empty room in the same voice, holding tightly onto his magnifying glass, occasionally swooping down to look at a mark on the wooden floor or lunging to sniff something.

‘Neptune!’ John said in his own voice, before assuming the role of The Detective once more.

‘Neptune, you say? Very well, Mister Watson, Neptune it is, come along, quickly now.’

John ran in a circle a few times around his room before ducking under the triangular clothes horse that he’d draped his quilt over and standing up, pretending to press some buttons and pull a couple of levers.

‘The game is on!’ he exclaimed, repeating what The Detective had said just before he’d begun to fix the crack in John’s bedroom wall. ‘Neeeowwwwm!’ he shouted, making a variety of other transport noises before he jumped out from under the sheets, magnifying glass in one hand, Detective doll in the other. ‘Neptune!’ he said in The Detective’s voice, about to say something else before he noticed Harry and two of her friends in the doorway, laughing silently.

Flushing bright red, John hurriedly put the doll and the magnifying glass back inside his makeshift TARDIS and stared at the floor, his stomach in knots.

‘You’re such a _loser_ , John!’ Harry exclaimed, laughing harder. ‘You and that Detective, I think you _love_ him.’

‘I do not,’ John mumbled, on the verge of tears. He _hated_ Harry.

‘Yes you do, because you’re a massive saddo who thinks that some random man turned up here in the middle of the night, got rid of an alien that was living in your wall and promised to take you away in his spaceship, probably back to where you _belong_ ,’ Harry said nastily.

‘Shut up, _Harriet_ ,’ John muttered, crawling back inside his tent and pulling the corner of the duvet so that he was obscured from view. He picked his Detective doll up and pressed it against his heart, pulling his knees up tightly and resting his head on top of them as he sniffed wetly. He heard Harry and her horrible friends run down the stairs, cackling.

‘Please come back one day, Detective,’ he whispered, wiping his eyes irritably, his cheeks burning red. ‘Please.’

***

 _Nine years and four months_

‘Please come back, please come back, please come back,’ John whispered frantically, curled in on himself in the first hiding place he’d found in the park: round the back of the toilet block, wedged between the hideous concrete structure and a tree. ‘Come back, come back, please, please, _please_ ,’ he begged, chest heaving from running from the bigger boys, his eyes shut tight as he willed The Detective and his magic box to appear.

‘You’re _dead meat_ , Watson!’ John heard a voice shout, and he pressed the palms of his hands hard over his ears, his lips moving frantically.

‘Please, please, please,’ he murmured, screwing his eyes up even more. ‘Please come back, please come back, please come back.’

Of course, The Detective didn’t come back. And at least when John was punched in the face by his assailant, he didn’t see it coming.

***

 _Eleven years and five months_

It had been a long time since The Detective had crash-landed in John’s back garden. John had started up at the big school a week ago and so far, he hated it. Even Granny Watson had said he ought to stop playing ‘his little detective game’ seeing as he was starting secondary school and she’d helped him (though John had been _very_ sulky and reluctant about it) take down all of his pictures of The Detective and his telephone box and different planets. She hadn’t made him throw them away, though, so that was something. They were all in a drawer in his room, neatly stacked, and his magnifying glass and the shirt and his ripped trousers and all of his other little objects for playing pretend with had been put in a box under his bed. Granny Watson had put the doll she’d knitted on a shelf before she’d left to go back home, but John had climbed up onto his desk and fetched him back down.

John was now sitting on the edge of his bed, doll next to him, looking at the football posters Granny Watson had put up, thoroughly, thoroughly miserable.

Maybe it _had_ been a dream. Maybe he’d been sleepwalking that night and imagined everything, maybe The Detective _wasn’t_ real. He’d said he would come back, and he hadn’t. Maybe John had made it all up.

Sighing heavily, John looked down at The Detective doll. ‘If you are real, and just really, _really_ late,’ he said sternly, ‘you’re going to have some _serious_ explaining to do.’

***

As often happens when little boys have something as distracting as secondary school and football practice and challenging homework and new friends to concentrate on, John’s not-so-imaginary friend was pushed to the back of his mind. He went to the park after school and hung round on the swings with his new friends, he went over the rec on the weekends to play football, to the youth club for discos and trying to get girls to snog him. He started to grow up, and he wasn’t as lonely as he was when he only had The Detective (and he wasn’t ever really _there_ ) and Granny Watson for company. The bike that one of his new friends gave him after they’d had a new one for their birthday meant he could get out of the house and away from Dad and Harry.

John turned twelve, then thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

The Detective doll moved from being tucked up against his pillows, to the bottom of his bed, to the shelf next to it and eventually underneath the bed, buried under a thick layer of dust.

He still thought about The Detective every time he saw a red telephone box, every time he looked up at the night sky, every time he made someone a cup of tea with one sugar and just a little bit of milk.

He still missed him.

He still wanted him to come back.


End file.
